Anthropic is in early talks to lease computing power from Meta in an arrangement worth about $10 billion over two years, paid in monthly increments, per CNBC's account of the New York Times report. The talks are described as very preliminary. For Meta it would mark the opening of the cloud business Mark Zuckerberg has been signaling, per CNN. He noted in May that companies regularly ask whether they can buy compute from Meta.
The arithmetic is roughly $415 million a month, and it would sit on top of the $1.25 billion a month Anthropic already committed to SpaceX for Colossus 1 GPUs. Add the 20-year, $19 billion TeraWulf lease we covered this month and the picture resolves: Anthropic is assembling compute from every landlord it can find because it cannot build capacity fast enough to serve Claude demand, even while approaching a $1 trillion valuation. Renting from three providers on three different structures is what a supply-constrained buyer looks like.
The counterparty is the strange part. Meta trains Llama and competes directly with Claude, so this deal would make it both a rival and the infrastructure underneath that rival. The shape is familiar (Microsoft has done it with OpenAI, Amazon with Anthropic) and it works because compute is fungible and the margin on idle capacity is hard to refuse. Meta has spent enormously on data centers, and renting the slack converts a capex line into revenue. The risk Meta accepts is funding a competitor's roadmap with its own hardware.
Bottom Line
Anthropic's willingness to rent from a direct rival tells you how tight compute really is. For Meta, selling slack capacity is the cheapest possible entry into cloud, and the first real test of whether it wants that business.